Entries by Death Penalty Information Center

In their new book, Deadly Justice: A Statistical Portrait of the Death Penalty, a team of researchers led by University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill polit­i­cal sci­ence pro­fes­sor Frank Baumgartner uses forty years of empir­i­cal data to assess whether the mod­ern death penal­ty avoids the defects that led the U.S. Supreme Court to declare in Furman v. Georigia (1972) that the nation’s appli­ca­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly arbi­trary and capri­cious. Their…

Claiming that a lack of lethal-injec­­tion drugs was pre­vent­ing the state from exe­cut­ing Bobby Wayne Stone (pic­tured, right) on December 1, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster (pic­tured, left) urged state leg­is­la­tors to act quick­ly to enact an exe­cu­­tion-drug secre­cy law. But as McMaster and Department of Corrections Director Bryan Stirling held a press con­fer­ence out­side barbed-wire fences at the Broad River Capital Punishment Facility in Columbia, South…

Joseph M. Giarratano (pic­tured), a for­mer Virginia death-row pris­on­er who came with­in two days of exe­cu­tion, has been been grant­ed parole after 38 years in jail for a rape and dou­ble mur­der that lawyers and sup­port­ers have long said he did not…

The life of Terry Ball (pic­tured) ​“is worth remem­ber­ing,” says his appeal lawyer, Elizabeth Hambourger. She says Ball’s life, which end­ed October 18 when he died of nat­ur­al caus­es on North Carolina​’s death row, ​“hold[s] keys to under­stand­ing the ori­gins of crime and our shared human­i­ty with peo­ple labeled the worst of the worst.” His ​“sto­ry of child­hood trau­ma and brain dam­age” is char­ac­ter­is­tic of the back­grounds of many on death row,…

Nevada has par­doned Fred Steese (pic­tured), who spent 21 years in prison after Las Vegas pros­e­cu­tors wrong­ly sought the death penal­ty against him while with­old­ing evi­dence that he was not even in the state at the time the mur­der occurred. In what news reports described as ​“a clear rebuke to the Las Vegas pros­e­cu­tors,” the Nevada Board of Pardons Commissioners vot­ed 8 – 1 on November 8 to grant Steese a full…

Having failed to find a suit­able vein in which to set an intra­venous exe­cu­tion line, Ohio called off the sched­uled November 15 exe­cu­tion of grave­ly ill and phys­i­cal­ly debil­i­tat­ed death-row pris­on­er, Alva Campbell…

A Utah coun­ty has fired an appeals lawyer who had pub­licly crit­i­cized the coun­ty’s under­fund­ing of death-penalty…

Ohio death-row pris­on­er Alva Campbell (pic­tured) is 69, suf­fers from severe chron­ic obstruc­tive pul­monary dis­or­der, is unable to walk with­out a walk­er, relies on a colosto­my bag that hangs out­side his body, requires four breath­ing treat­ments each day, may have lung can­cer, and is report­ed­ly aller­gic to mida­zo­lam, the con­tro­ver­sial first drug in the state’s lethal-injec­­tion process. Prison per­son­nel have been unable to find veins suit­able for inserting an…

A for­mer Florida death-row doc­tor says the expe­ri­ence of U.S. mil­i­tary vet­er­ans who have been sen­tenced to death pro­vides a lens through which the pub­lic can bet­ter under­stand some of the fail­ures of the state’s death penal­ty and iden­ti­fy oppor­tu­ni­ties for mean­ing­ful reform of the criminal justice…

As Nebraska announced its inten­tion to use a nev­er-before-tried four-drug exe­cu­tion com­bi­na­tion fea­tur­ing the opi­od pain med­ica­tion fen­tanyl and the par­a­lyt­ic drug cisatracuri­um, a Nevada judge issued a stay of exe­cu­tion that put off the nation’s first attempt­ed exe­cu­tion using those…